The course gives a general overview of (Neo-)Davidsonian event
semantics and its motivation from adverbial modification. It
furthermore introduces the notion of event structure, both from
a conceptual and a model-theoretic point of view. An important
issue concerns how far event structure, aspectual structure and
argument structure are mutually related and whether it is
possible or even preferable to reduce them to one. To identify
elements of the event structure, argument structure and/or
aspectual structure, we focus on the (un-)availability of
various adverbial modifiers, in particular manner, temporal,
aspectual and spatial ones, as well as the relation of such
modifiers to the overall structure, e.g. the issue of high
(event-external) vs. low (event-internal) adverbs. The
presentation of the cross-linguistic diversity in the marking of
voice and argument and adjunct roles, and phenomena like serial
verb constructions, lead to a general discussion of the nat ure
of the verbal category.